Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.

The difference between man and woman is like that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling.

Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.

How good one feels when one is full - how satisfied with ourselves and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented. But a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well-digested meal - so noble-minded, so kindly-hearted.

The illustrious bishop of Cambrai was of more worth than his chambermaid, and there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce, if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be preferred.

The advice to limit our concerns might go along with the happy belief in an invisible hand or mechanism by which a number of independent agents, each acting on their own narrow concerns, in fact maximize the social good. This mechanism is the great buttress to free markets and laissez-faire capitalism. Unfortunately, there are situations in which instead of an invisible hand there is an invisible boot, ensuring that the same agents do worse than they would under a more generous regime of concern for each other.

I, who used to have such patience with my own species, and who for so long saw everything through rose-coloured spectacles, now see only darkness. I used to judge others by myself. I have made great progress in schooling my own character. I have sown my volcanoes with grass and flowers, and they were getting on well.

At the same time computers were gaining acceptance as intimate machines, psychotherapy was being conceptualized as less intimate as a cooler, more cognitive, and more scientific technique. These days, people seem increasingly ready to view psychotherapy in terms of rules and information and the dispensing of drugs, the sort of things a computer might know something about, rather than as a deep, even eroticized relationship with a therapist, the sort of thing a computer would know nothing about.

How good one feels when one is full, how satisfied with ourselves and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented. But a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well digested meal so noble-minded, so kindly hearted.

Writing that springs from the surface of existence when there is no other way and the deeper wells have dried up is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes that surface shake. That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

But we must also allow, that some part of the seeming harmony in morals may be accounted for from the very nature of language. The word virtue, with its equivalent in every tongue, implies praise, as that of vice does blame, and no one, without the most obvious and grossest impropriety, could affix reproach to a term, which in general acceptation is understood in a good sense, or bestow applause, where the idiom requires disapprobation.

If the question is asked, what are the most intelligent and all round capable things on earth, the answer is obvious: human beings. Everyone knows this, except certain religious people. A person is certainly a believer in some religion if he thinks, for example, that there are on earth millions of invisible and immortal nonhuman beings which are far more intelligent and capable than we are. But that is exactly what sociobiologists do think, about genes. Sociobiology, then, is a religion: one which has genes as its gods.

In the English speaking world the great majority of books that have been published in philosophy in the twentieth century are like academic paintings: they show unmistakable talent and are professionally competent, the result of long processes of learning, application and work, everything in them is accurate, in its right place, and as it should be, but it makes not the slightest difference whether they exist or not.

A great novelist is essentially tolerant, that is, displays a real apprehension of persons other than the author as having a right to exist and to have a separate mode of being which is important and interesting to themselves.

As someone who has done a good deal of marching and public speaking about Vietnam, Chile, South Africa, Palestine and East Timor in his time and would do it all again, I can only hint at how much I despise a Left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti imperialist. He actually says he wants to restore the old imperial caliphate and has condemned the Australian led international rescue of East Timor as a Christian plot against Muslim Indonesia. Or a Left that can think of Milosevic and Saddam as victims.

For as to the dispersing of Books, that Circumstance does perhaps as much harm as good. Since Nonsense flies with greater Celerity, and makes greater Impression than Reason, though indeed no particular species of Nonsense is so durable. But the several Forms of Nonsense never cease succeeding one another, and Men are always under the Dominion of some one or other, though nothing was ever equal in Absurdity and Wickedness to our present Patriotism.

How good one feels when one is full how satisfied with ourselves and with the world. People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented, but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well digested meal so noble minded, so kindly-hearted.

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.

There are two sorts of laws, those of absolute equity and universality, and the bizarre ones which owe their autonomy only to blindness or to the force of circumstance. The latter merely cover the man who is breaking them with a passing disgrace, which time then transfers to the judges and the nations, on whom it remains forever.

Memes now spread around the world at the speed of light, and replicate at rates that make even fruit flies and yeast cells look glacial in comparison. They leap promiscuously from vehicle to vehicle, and from medium to medium, and are proving to be virtually unquarantinable.

Every possible idea therefore may be said to be used existentially, for every possible idea qualifies and is true of a real world. And the number of real worlds, in a word, is indefinite. Every idea therefore in a sense is true, and is true of reality. The question with every idea is how far and in what sense is it true. The question is always whether, qualifying reality in one sense, the idea qualifies reality in another sense also. For, true in one world, an idea may be false in another world.

The propositions of mathematics have, therefore, the same unquestionable certainty which is typical of such propositions as. All bachelors are unmarried but they also share the complete lack of empirical content which is associated with that certainty. The propositions of mathematics are devoid of all factual content, they convey no information whatever on any empirical subject matter.

I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some
way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.

For as to the dispersing of Books, that Circumstance does perhaps as much harm as good. Since Nonsense flies with greater Celerity, and makes greater Impression than Reason, though indeed no particular species of Nonsense is so durable. But the several Forms of Nonsense never cease succeeding one another, and Men are always under the Dominion of some one or other, though nothing was ever equal in Absurdity and Wickedness to our present Patriotism.

By recognizing a favorable opinion of yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension.

Many mental processes admit of being roughly measured. For instance, the degree to which people are bored, by counting the number of their fidgets.These observations should be confined to persons of middle age. Children are rarely still, while elderly philosophers will sometimes remain rigid for minutes altogether.

The most ordinary things are to philosophy a source of insoluble puzzles. With infinite ingenuity it constructs a concept of space or time and then finds it absolutely impossible that there be objects in this space or that processes occur during this time, the source of this kind of logic lies in excessive confidence in the so called laws of thought.

The essential fact which emerges is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs, of carbon in the global carbon cycle, the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

For it is esteemed a kind of dishonour unto learning to descend to inquiry or meditation upon matters mechanical, except they be such as may be thought secrets, rarities, and special subtilities, which humour of vain supercilious arrogancy is justly derided in Plato. But the truth is, they be not the highest instances that give the securest nformation, as may well be expressed in the tale of the philosopher, that while he gazed upwards to the stars fell into the water, for if he had looked down he might have seen the stars in the water, but looking aloft he could not see the water in the stars.

Humanity needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit.

Some of my cousins who had the great advantage of University education used to tease me with arguments to prove that nothing has any existence except what we think of it.These amusing mental acrobatics are all right to play with.They are perfectly harmless and perfectly useless.I always rested on the following argument We look up to the sky and see the sun. Our eyes are dazzled and our senses record the fact. So here is this great sun standing apparently on no better foundation than our physical sense.